One Good Move has video of George Saunders’s September 6 appearance on Letterman. I thought he was very entertaining. (The commenters at One Good Move seem a bit crabby, though.) You can assure yourself of precisely that manner of tomfoolery if you attend one of the many Saunders events in the coming weeks.
I love David Letterman, but I would never accuse him of being in the least highbrow. Perhaps Saunders will spark a trend! I’m sensing a good opportunity for a little reader participation.
Question: Steve Martin aside (he’s always the big outlier in such matters), can anyone think of other “serious” writers appearing on the show? I’m pondering who the least likely literary guest Letterman ever had might have been. (My brain just concocted a fleeting image of Beckett grimacing at Paul Shaffer.) Is there a good resource for checking past Letterman guests? If not, I’m sure our readers have plenty of mind-blowing anecdotal evidence to share.
As far as I’m concerned, we can consider the NBC show as part of this too. (Hat tip: The Millions and Paper Cuts.) —Martin Schneider
Category Archives: The Squib Report
Parkerfest 2007: You Might As Well Live It Up
The 9th annual Parkerfest is upon us! (Note that it’s been around one year longer than the New Yorker Festival, with which it shares a weekend this year.) The Dorothy Parker Society celebrates its eponym with a speakeasy night, a walking tour, a Round Table lunch, music, readings, and more. Sign up for the Society’s newsletter, and you will be constantly up to date on all matters Parker-related.
Parkerfest 2007 will be held on October 4, 5, and 6, and will be joined by the Robert Benchley Society for a double-whammy party.
Thursday, Oct. 4
Dorothy Parker Reading, Mo Pitkin’s House of Satisfaction, 7-9 p.m.
Titled “The Potable Dorothy Parker” and co-produced by Celia Bressack and Stephanie Sellars, this is the second year in a row that this unique ensemble has presented Mrs. Parker’s work in the East Village. The address is 34 Avenue A, admission is a suggested $5.
Friday, Oct. 5
Cocktails at the Algonquin Hotel. 6-8 p.m. Meet in lobby. Cash bar.
Saturday, Oct. 6
Dorothy Parker-Robert Benchley Walking Tour. 11 a.m. meet in lobby. $15.
Lunch at the Round Table. 1:15 p.m. meet in lobby. Cash only.
Dorothy Parker-Robert Benchley Banquet. 6:30 p.m. Pete’s Tavern. 2-hour open bar and dinner. $50 per person. Cash only. RSVP
here (limited space available).
Dorothy Parker Bathtub Gin Ball. 10:00 p.m. The Bridge Cafe. 2-hour open bar and party. Ticket TBD per person. Cash only. RSVP
here (limited space available).
My father once attended a birthday party for Marcel Proust hosted by the Proust Society, and that was awfully festive, but this sounds like even more fun.
—Martin Schneider
Wood Heaves Darts of Disapproval at DeLillo. In Error?
Does anyone know when James Wood’s first New Yorker review will run? Those who haven’t read The Broken Estate or The Irresponsible Self lately might welcome Garth Risk Hallberg’s refresher course on Wood’s approach in the form of a thoughtful critique of Wood’s takedown of DeLillo’s ambitious novel Underworld. Hallberg insists that Wood’s just not getting it. I found the book a little starchy, but I expected that going in. None of which is to say that it failed to meet its goals, exactly. I remain agnostic on the subject. How did Underworld go over out there?
Either way, I find it cheering to see such fervent advocacy for an admittedly difficult novel. Hallberg clearly loves the big ambitious fiction of DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace, references “Jonathans Franzen and Lethem” (endearing him to us, anyway), and treats his adversary (Wood) with due respect: “The essays on Chekhov and Mann in The Broken Estate should be required reading for any novelist.” I really like the flow chart Hallberg provides of “Literary/Critical Conflicts of the Past Two Decades,” with its droll “Darts of Disapproval” and “Rings of Harmony.” How refreshing to see (for instance) n+1, Dale Peck, and Cynthia Ozick diagrammed so saucily and succinctly! —Martin Schneider
This George Saunders Blog Will Surely Be Singular
The Millions kindly reminds us that New Yorker regular George Saunders is spending the week blogging at the Powell’s site. (We can even see where it all started; so much for the worry that the small moments of literary history may be lost in the digital age.) Judging from the first post, it should be a hoot.
Saunders is promoting his new book, The Braindead Megaphone; he’s doing a whole bunch of readings this month, some of which are listed in our Google Calendar. If you haven’t signed up for the jam-packed calendar yet, check it out here. —Martin Schneider
Happy 100th Birthday, William Shawn
Emily asked me to write this post yesterday. By chance, a few hours earlier, I had been watching a recent movie about a magazine editor. You know which one I mean: The Devil Wears Prada, with the delightful Meryl Streep portraying Miranda Priestly, the undelightful editor of Runway. She’s tyrannical, perverse, charming, disdainful, and petulant—a fine movie villain, all the more potent for our knowledge that, as is not the case with Darth Vader, something very much like her is actually out there.
The movie (can’t speak for the book) largely accepts Priestly’s view of the world. Stanley Tucci’s Nigel intones some fol-de-rol about the superiority of fashion over art. Indeed, there’s only one force external to Priestly in the entire world that the movie posits as unquestionably superior to the values of Miranda Priestly: The New Yorker. (We know this because it is the ambition of Anne Hathaway’s beleaguered assistant, Andy, to work there. She is putting up with Miranda Priestly to work there.)
William Shawn was the anti-Miranda Priestly. I can’t think of anybody who tried harder to make The New Yorker a magazine to provide solace and comfort in a world too often dominated by the values of, ah, Runway—than William Shawn.
William Shawn was born one hundred years ago today. His name was Chon then.
I sometimes find Shawn a difficult literary-historical figure to like. (You know you’re in trouble when they hire Bob Balaban to play you.) Obviously intelligent and discerning, Shawn was also reportedly highly phobic and fussy. He was the kind of person, I suspect, who used excessive diffidence as a means to get his way. In accounts of him, he comes off as prudish and secretive as well. I point out these traits because—I mean, what goes into a great magazine editor? Who are the great magazine editors-in-chief in this country, anyway? The New Yorker aside for a moment, it’s a fun parlor game. Clay Felker? Kurt Andersen? I.F. Stone? Harold Hayes? Hugh Hefner? Ben Sonnenberg? George Plimpton? (We can expand the field a bit to include Henry Luce.)
It’s interesting to me that in among all these outsize figures is this small, mousy fusspot, and he just might be the best of the bunch. You have a picture in your head of what constitutes a brilliant magazine editor, and Shawn’s there to prove that it might be totally wrong.
The most economical way to express Shawn’s expansive cast of mind is to present a simple list, the Profile subjects for a single year. Here’s 1975. There are 34 other years like it.
Erskine Hamilton Childers, president of Ireland
Henri Langlois, film historian and collector
Jim Hall, jazz guitarist
Shirley Verrett, opera singer
Nam June Paik, a pioneer in video art
Rev. Edward Thomas Hougen, Orange, Mass. (pop. 6,188)
Betty Parsons, N.Y. art dealer
Cary Grant, movie actor
Michel Guerard, French chef
John Crosby, founder, Santa Fe Opera
apples
Jess Stacy, jazz pianist
Philip Barry, popular playwright
House of Baedeker, German travel-book publishers
Carmen Santana (fictitious name), a welfare mother
Robert Freitas, official, baseball minor leagues
I.I. Rabi, physicist (two parts)
Harvey Phillips, virtuoso tubist
Clarence “Ducky” Nash, voice of Donald Duck
To the least parochial editor who ever lived, on his hundredth birthday, here’s to you.
(January magazine also has a tribute to Shawn today.)
—Martin Schneider
The Halberstam Tribute Tour
Martin Schneider writes:
David Halberstam was probably the first serious American nonfiction writer I read, so news of his sudden death in April came as quite a shock to me.
I didn’t become a serious reader until college, but I read Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game and The Powers That Be as a teenager, and both books had a profound effect on me. I don’t think I’ve ever read a better nonfiction book about professional sports—a subject I cared a lot about at the time—than The Breaks of the Game. The Powers That Be seemed likewise world-changingly important. There are many situations and stories from those books I can still summon at will.
I wasn’t certain whether Halberstam had been published in The New Yorker, but in fact, he was: the archive contains two items by him in the 1990s, one on Michael Jordan and one on Robert McNamara. I don’t know about Jordan, but there probably wasn’t a more qualified person in the world to discuss McNamara.
For all of these reasons, I was glad to see that a group of esteemed writers has volunteered to promote Halberstam’s posthumously published book The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War for Hyperion. The group includes Frances FitzGerald, Alex Kotlowitz, Cynthia Gorney, Neil Sheehan, Joan Didion, and Gay Talese, and the tour kicks off with seven events across the country on a single day. Here’s the schedule:
Halberstam Tribute Tour
9/25/2007
Adam Hochschild and Geoffrey Wolff
Portland, ME
Dexter Filkins, Frances Fitzgerald, Leslie Gelb, Lt. Gen.
(Ret) Harold G. Moore, Don Oberdorfer, and William Stueck.
New York, NY
Cynthia Gorney
San Francisco, CA
Anna Quindlen
Milwaukee, WI
Alex Kotlowitz
Chicago, IL
Bill Walton
San Diego, CA
Ward Just
Martha’s Vineyard, MA
9/26/2007
Neil Sheehan and Jim Wooten
Washington, DC
9/27/2007
Paul Hendrickson
Philadelphia, PA
9/30/2007
Nathaniel Philbrick
Nantucket, MA
10/3/2007
John Seigenthaler and John M. Seigenthaler
Nashville, TN
10/4/2007
Samantha Power
Boston, MA
10/15/2007
Joan Didion, Robert McNeil, Jon Meacham, and Gay Talese
New York, NY
More details at Hyperion and at the Emdashes Google Calendar.
View of the World From the Stephansdom
It was the evening of August 13, my only night in Vienna. I had just consumed a tasty slice of chocolate cake (not too sweet, in the Viennese style) at the Salzamt, in the city’s cobblestoned Bermuda Dreieck district. It was late, and the shops were all closed. I walked by one named Galerie Image, selling paintings and prints. Something oddly familiar caught my eye:
I don’t know who the artist is, but the drawing’s not bad. It’s a little difficult to read the text from my photo, but I’m pretty sure it goes like this, from top (that is, most incomprehensibly remote) to bottom:
ANTARKTIK
INDISCHER OZEAN ATLANTIK
Capetown
SIMBABWE
St. Helena
UHURU
Djibouti Timbuktu
MITTEL MEER
WIENER BERG WIENER WALD
GÜRTEL
RING
STEPHANSPLATZ
—Martin Schneider
And They Were Never Heard From Again
One of the pleasures of the Complete New Yorker is stumbling on a figure mentioned in one context who would later become much better known in a completely different context. Two intriguing examples from the early 1980s follow.
In a September 21, 1981, look at Hope, Arkansas (how prescient!), writer Berton Roueche, curious about the town’s (county’s? state’s?) continued reliance on laws prohibiting the consumption of alcohol, solicited the views of a local realtor. “I’m a Presbyterian,” the man said. “I believe in taking a drink…. But I don’t have to go all the way down to Texarkana unless I happen to feel like taking a drive. All I got to do is pick up that phone over there and dial a certain number. And I’m not talking about moonshine.”
The name of that realtor? Vincent W. Foster.
A November 24, 1980, TOTT by Elizabeth Hawes (in a strategy that would anticipate Harper’s) is almost entirely a reproduction of a very long list compiled by a Connecticut woman charged with catering a “light buffet supper” at the Fall Antiques Show. The list includes such entries as:
20 pounds butter
1,200 chive biscuits
42 white sailor hats
2 bushels decorative gourds
9 bales hay
…and so on. The list really must be seen in its entirety.
The name of that caterer? Martha Stewart.
—Martin Schneider
The Effect of Tacos on Man-in-the-Moon Magazines
Kevin Drum poses a question of vital importance. To start with, he quotes the following passage from Herman Wouk’s 1950s novel Youngblood Hawke:
Soon the lawyer sat in the living room in his shirtsleeves at Jeanne’s insistence, his tie off, eating tacos from a tray. He needed a shave, and his hair was unkempt. Hawke noticed that the bristles on his face were reddish rather than blond. He looked more tired than Hawke had ever seen him, but the food and the beer brought him to quickly. “Why, these things are marvellous! What do you call them, Jeanne, tacos? I’ve never eaten anything like this. Delicious! Is there a restaurant in town where I can order these?”
She said, pleased, “Well, if you can find a lowbrow enough Mexican joint they’ll probably have tacos, but I wouldn’t endorse the contents, Gus. Better ask me, when you feel like having them again. They’re easy to make.”
Kevin, a Californian to the core, then asks: “Really? In New York City, circa 1952, tacos were so uncommon as to be practically unknown? Who knew?”
I’m far too young to have any real insights into this question, but I immediately thought of the Complete New Yorker. The results turned out to be pretty interesting. According to the CNY, the earliest mention of the word “taco” was in 1974. There are actually two hits from 1974. In the later of the two, a cartoon by Barney Tobey (July 15, 1974), the gag turns on the “exotic” nature of the taco, although the context implies that the term was at least somewhat known to New Yorker readers.
More interesting is the first hit, two months earlier (May 13, 1974). It’s a TOTT by Anthony Hiss about something called the “Taco Trolley.” The first paragraph supplies the telltale tone:
The taco is a tasty, crispy tortilla filled with beef, lettuce, shredded cheese, and special sauce. It is a wildly popular fast-food item in California and places like that. In fact, the taco is one of the reasons people visit California.
Ha! I love it—”places like that.” Difficult to see anyone getting away with that today. And that dryly dismissive third sentence seems a precursor to Woody Allen’s joke from Annie Hall that “the only cultural advantage” that Los Angeles can claim is that “you can make a right turn on a red light.”
I think it’s safe to assume that, July cartoon or no July cartoon, the New Yorker editors thought it wiser to explain exactly what a taco is and where it comes from. So it wasn’t exactly everyday lingo.
(The comment thread to Kevin’s post is fascinating, constituting a kind of thumbnail cultural history of the taco in the United States. It’s truly the blogosphere at its finest. My findings here merely confirm the observations of many of the commenters there.)
—Martin Schneider
“That Was in The New Yorker?!”
I propose a new category: works of fiction that originally appeared in The New Yorker that later took on a life of their own apart from the magazine. Criteria for inclusion in the group would include authentic fame, to the point that people uninterested in or unacquainted with the magazine would still have heard of it or might have some well-defined attitude towards it. Revelation that the item originally appeared in The New Yorker might come as a mild surprise.
A relevant anecdote: when I was in college (this was in about 1990), I was chatting with a friend of mine, a decidedly unliterary type, a poli-sci major who later went into finance. He was telling me about this great sci-fi story he had once read, about this contraption that could insert people into novels. About halfway through his account, my face took on a look of bemused recognition. Once he was done, I said, “You know who wrote that story? Woody Allen.” I can still hear his delighted hoot of astonishment in my mind.
This sort of thing represents a tremendous accomplishment for a work of fiction, I think. Indeed, it’s arguably close to the highest “social” accomplishment that a work of fiction can attain, that it nevertheless affects people who don’t even care about books that much. You can be sure that you’ve entered the social network at large when your song is converted into Muzak form for consumption in supermarkets, you know?
For the same reason, I think the list of such works is very, very short. There’s a danger here of “merely” listing very often anthologized works, but suffice to say there’ll be some overlap. The two criteria, “taking on a life of its own” and “people would be surprised by New Yorker origins,” are not at all the same thing, so some may qualify on one but not the other.
Here’s my list in progress, in chronological order:
James Thurber, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” March 18, 1939
James Thurber, “The Catbird Seat,” November 14, 1942
J.D. Salinger, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” January 31, 1948
Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery,” June 26, 1948
John Updike, “A&P,” July 22, 1961
Woody Allen, “The Kugelmass Episode,” May 2, 1977
Philip Roth, “The Ghost Writer,” June 25, 1979
Raymond Carver, “Where I’m Calling From,” July 19, 1982
Annie Proulx, “Brokeback Mountain,” October 13, 1997
Almost all of Salinger’s stories have become part of the culture at large, even as any informed reader knows where they first appeared. Updike’s story is much anthologized, but I don’t know how much ordinary readers care about it—I think it’s a legitimate criticism of Updike’s outsize reputation (obviously quite deserved) that he has never created a fictional character with half the popular currency of, say, Portnoy. (Rabbit? Maybe. But Rabbit is not a creature of The New Yorker, alas.)
Can you think of any others? I can’t, but I’m sure there are plenty of good candidates I haven’t listed so far. Did any of Nabokov’s stories acquire its own fame at large? Irwin Shaw? John Cheever? John O’Hara? What stories have taken flight, like Charlotte’s baby spiders, far away from The New Yorker?
—Martin Schneider